In the winter of 1978, Peter R. Jennings, a British-Canadian scientist and computer programmer, had the very rare privilege of meeting Bobby Fischer, the mythical 11th World Chess Champion, who was spasmodically interested in testing the strength of ChessMate, a prototype chess program developed by Jennings himself. Fischer also considered licensing his name for the product, but in the end he didn’t do anything about it. In his long recounting of his encounters with Fischer, who had been living like a hermit in Pasadena for six years, Jennings gives many interesting anecdotes of how the dethroned king used to live, hidden, in a sort of limbo. Apparently, Fischer had already drowned in his loneliness, perhaps as a consequence of his traumatic breakup with the Worldwide Church of God the year before. His conversation might have been quite repetitive, but an irrepressible longing for spirituality got made him spend quite a lot of time in the Huntington Desert Garden searching for an oasis.
They met for three consecutive days and dined together every day. It was the evening of the second day (Friday, March 10), a day after his 35th birthday, that Fischer shared with Jennings a secret so secret that he never told anyone about it and kept it a secret until the early 1990s. “He also told me about his ideas for random chess, where, in the starting position, the pieces are arranged randomly so that there is no advantage to studying the book openings”, writes Jennings. “He wondered what I thought of the idea and encouraged me to write a program to incorporate the game. I pointed out that the ChessMate has the ability to place the pieces anywhere before starting play so it would be possible to use it that way already”.
They met for three consecutive days and dined together every day. It was the evening of the second day (Friday, March 10), a day after his 35th birthday, that Fischer shared with Jennings a secret so secret that he never told anyone about it and kept it a secret until the early 1990s. “He also told me about his ideas for random chess, where, in the starting position, the pieces are arranged randomly so that there is no advantage to studying the book openings”, writes Jennings. “He wondered what I thought of the idea and encouraged me to write a program to incorporate the game. I pointed out that the ChessMate has the ability to place the pieces anywhere before starting play so it would be possible to use it that way already”.
Aloe & Blue Stick succulents, Huntington Library Desert Garden. Photo: Pamla J. Eisenberg. |
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